My Parents Took Me Voting. Now I'm Doing The Same With My Daughter.

My earliest memories of voting take place at the elementary school up the street from my parents’ house. Every Election Day, my parents would bring me and my younger sister along with them to the polls. I remember standing in the long lines impatiently wondering when it’d be our turn. I remember at least one year where there was a mock ballot for kids. And, perhaps most importantly to elementary-school-aged me, I remember receiving the prized Future Voter sticker at the end.

At the time, I didn’t think of any of this as civic education. My parents weren’t necessarily sitting us down for lectures about democracy or giving us pop quizzes on the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (although that would come later during my AP U.S. Government class). My parents were simply voting and we were watching. But, as it turns out, we were learning by observing.

My parents made it abundantly clear to my sister and me that voting was both a right and a responsibility — and that this wasn’t always the case for people who looked like us. As Black girls growing up in America, that history mattered. We learned that Black people had marched, organized, been beaten and even killed for the right my parents exercised so routinely at the elementary school around the corner.

So, when Election Day came around, we went. And not just for the presidential elections every four years. My parents participated in every election — local, federal, didn’t matter. The responsibility was the same.

By the time I was finally old enough to vote myself, I couldn’t wait.

I missed being able to vote in the 2004 presidential election by a year, which meant the 2008 election would be my first chance to vote for president. And I felt elated that my first presidential vote would be for the country’s first Black president.

At the time, I was working as a reporter at my community newspaper in a conservative county in Maryland. On Election Day, a colleague and I spent hours driving around to various polling places, interviewing voters and reporting on turnout before returning to the Board of Elections to wait for results.

After work, I went home and watched the national returns with my dad. When Barack Obama walked onto the stage in Chicago’s Grant Park with his beautiful Black family, I remember staring at the television in disbelief.

Wow, I thought to myself, soaking in the moment. I just witnessed history.

But elections don’t always end with the history you hoped to witness.

In 2016, I proudly cast my ballot for Hillary Clinton and went to bed believing we were about the elect the country’s first woman president. We all know how that turned out.

Four years later, I voted for Joe Biden, but I was especially excited about his running mate, Kamala Harris, whom I’d supported in the Democratic primary. Watching a Black and Asian woman become vice president meant something different to me. Of course, representation isn’t the only reason to vote for someone and I think we’re all doing ourselves a disservice if we pretend as if identity is entirely separate from politics. As a Black woman in America, I’d spent most of my life looking at the highest echelons of power and rarely seeing anyone who looks like you.

And then I became a mom.

In the spring of 2024, I picked up my then two-year-old daughter Violet from daycare, went to swim lessons and then swung by our neighborhood elementary school to vote in the Illinois presidential primary. With her little puffs and binky in tow, she naturally became the star of the polling place.

Our next-door neighbor, Mr. Steve, was working the polls that day and gave Violet a Future Voter sticker. She was entranced. To her, the sticker was probably the best part of the whole outing, which, when I thought about it, was exactly how I felt when I was her age (and, let’s be real, is also how I feel as an adult).

Afterward, we went outside to the school playground and, as I watched her run around, it hit me what a full-circle moment this had become. And then I had another thought: This could be a children’s book.

I wanted to write a book that could explain voting to children around Violet’s age: something that would talk about walking into a polling place; why grown-ups stood in line to fill out ballots; what even is a ballot; and why any of this matters anyway.

That fateful afternoon eventually became the premise of Violet Goes Voting, an early reader about a little girl accompanying her parents to the polls and learning that voting is one way we use our voices. But the book was just the beginning.

That fall, my husband and I took Violet with us when we voted in the presidential election. This time, I had a very specific picture in my head of what the moment might look like in both real life and the book version. My daughter would sit on my lap as I cast my ballot to elect the first Black woman president of the United States.

My parents had taken their Black daughters to the polls so we would understand that our voices mattered. Decades later, I would take mine with me as I helped elect a Black woman to the White House. Except, of course, that’s not what happened.

Like so many people, I woke up the next morning devastated. The history I had imagined sharing with my daughter would have to wait. Since then, I’ve thought a lot about what, exactly, I want Violet to inherit from me and learn from all of this.

Because maybe the lesson was never supposed to be that if you show up, your candidate will win. My parents certainly never promised that to me. What they taught me was the importance of showing up anyway.

Voting is a small part of civic engagement, but it was my introduction to it nonetheless. Long before I knew what a primary was, before I understood the harsh reality of voter suppression or could name any of my congressional representatives, before I was old enough to fill in a bubble next to a candidate’s name, I knew what Election Day looked like.

It looked like my parents making time to go to the polls. It looked like my sister and me eagerly tagging along. It looked like waiting our turn. And, yes, it looked like getting a sticker at the end.

Now, as a mom, I understand that those seemingly ordinary trips were teaching me something much bigger: This is what our family does. We show up. We pay attention. We responsibly exercise the rights people before us fought to secure. We don’t take them for granted.

Only time will tell who Violet will vote for when she’s old enough to cast her first ballot. And, frankly, we have a while before that happens. She’s much more interested in playgrounds than politics at the moment, which is exactly how it should be for an innocent five-year-old.

But I hope that when her first Election Day arrives, she’ll look back on our family selfie from outside the voting place in 2024. I hope she’ll remember me reading to her the book that she inspired. I hope she understands why walking into that booth and making her own choice carries a history older than the both of us combined.

But most of all and most importantly, I simply hope she shows up. Because that’s the inheritance my parents gave me and my sister. And now it’s mine to pass on.

L’Oreal Thompson Payton is an author, journalist and the founder of Zora’s Place, a Black feminist bookstore and community hub in Evanston, Illinois. Her books include Stop Waiting for Perfect, Amanda Gorman: Poet and Activist, Violet Goes Voting and the highly-anticipated memoir Infertile Black Girl (Fall 2027). Her byline has appeared in outlets such as Essence, Fortune, New York magazine and SELF. Learn more at lorealthompsonpayton.com.